As more and more electronic information is generated by governments and businesses, security and privacy of this information becomes problematic. Governments and business are required to ensure personal information and documents containing classified or confidential information are properly managed. The safeguarding of electronic documents is paramount to ensure that personal information is protected from the threat of identity theft and privacy breaches.
With respect to governments, information needs to be secured while still enforcing the public's right to be informed of the activities of the governments. With respect to businesses, corporate and personal information needs to be secured. For instance, in a web-based medical record use case, there is a need to control a doctor's access levels for viewing the record versus a medical receptionist's access rights. The doctor should be given complete access to his patient's medical history while the medical receptionist should be prevented from viewing a patient's sensitive data.
Most current information management systems are rule-based systems. Rule-based systems are problematic because their learning capabilities are limited. For example, an administrator is required to create the rules used by the system. This is very time consuming and does not allow the system to easily adapt to changing environments. If information does not fall within a rule the information is not protected even though the information is similar to other protected information.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.